After spending 30 hours researching and testing the top five contenders, we found that the Microsoft Surface Book 2 is the best laptop for creative professionals. The Surface Book 2 had some of the fastest 4K rendering speeds we tested, and it has an excellent keyboard and trackpad and a healthy variety of ports. Its 4K display is the most accurate of the Windows laptops we tested this year, though it isn’t accurate enough for video color grading or print production work; if you do those things, pick up the 15-inch Apple MacBook Pro.

Our pick

The Surface Book 2 has powerful specs and the best battery life and most accurate screen of any Windows laptop we tested. It’s reliable enough for most creative tasks, but not quite accurate enough for video color grading and print production.

Buying Options

The Surface Book 2 configuration we recommend costs around $2,900—we know! Keep reading—and it has a 4K display, an eighth-generation 1.9 GHz Intel Core i7-8650U processor, 16 GB of RAM, and a 512 GB solid-state drive. It also comes with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 with 6 GB VRAM, a powerful graphics processor that can handle demanding tasks such as quickly exporting 4K footage in Adobe Premiere Pro or gaming. The Surface Book 2’s keyboard is clicky and comfortable to use for long periods of time, and its trackpad is even better: It tracks smoothly and accurately, and it executes gestures and other Windows-related tasks with ease. It also has all the necessary ports and connections: two USB 3.0 ports, a USB-C port (though not Thunderbolt 3), as well as a full-size SD card reader, and a proprietary Surface Connect port. It also had the longest battery life of any laptop we tested this year by about 20 minutes, and you can even detach its screen and use it as a tablet if you want.

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Also great

The 2018 MacBook Pro has the best display of any laptop we’ve tested, and it’s accurate enough for video color grading and print production. Its keyboard is shallow and its battery life is short, but it’s the most powerful option for those who prefer Apple.

Buying Options

If you need a laptop with a screen precise enough for print photo production or video color grading, get the Apple 15-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar (2018). The MacBook Pro’s 15.4-inch Retina display has a resolution of 2880×1800—lower than the 4K screens on the Surface Book 2 and the XPS 15 Touch—but it was more color accurate than its competition, and it’s the only one of our picks that’s technically accurate enough for color grading and print production work. It also reproduced more of the sRGB color gamut than the Surface Book 2, and it supports the DCI/P3 color gamut while our top pick doesn’t. It has the best trackpad we’ve used on a laptop, as well. But it has a shallow keyboard, it lacks legacy ports, it has a high price tag, and it suffers from a shorter battery life than we’d like. We recommend the $3,150 model—about $250 more than the Surface Book 2—with a 2.6 GHz eighth-generation Intel Core i7 processor, 16 GB of RAM, 512 GB of solid-state storage, and Radeon Pro Vega 20 dedicated graphics with 4 GB of memory.

Budget pick

The Dell XPS 15 Touch has fast 4K rendering speeds and decent battery life, and it costs almost $1,000 less than the Microsoft Surface Book 2. Its screen is less accurate, but you can buy a great 4K monitor with the money you save and still have some left over.

Buying Options

If you’re looking for a cheaper option, you don't need to do precise color work, or you don't mind relying on an external monitor when you do, get the Dell XPS 15 Touch. It is not as accurate as the Microsoft Surface Book 2, much less the MacBook Pro: Its reds, in particular, were so oversaturated that we don’t recommend it for photo editing or color grading video. Instead, pair the Dell XPS 15 Touch with our favorite 4K monitor pick, the HP Z27, which is accurate enough for photo and video production work, and buying the XPS 15 plus the Z27 still costs less than one Microsoft Surface Book 2.

We recommend the configuration with an eighth-generation, Intel Core i7-8750H processor, 16 GB of RAM, a 512 GB solid-state drive, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050Ti, and a 15.6-inch 3840×2160 IPS touchscreen. At the time of this guide's publishing, this configuration cost around $1,930. It was a few seconds faster than the Microsoft Surface Book 2 at exporting 4K video in Adobe Premiere Pro. It’s about as portable as the Surface Book 2, and its keyboard and trackpad are decent but not as enjoyable to use. Unfortunately, its webcam is located below its screen, and it fell about a half hour behind the Surface Book 2 in battery-life testing.

Everything we recommend

Our pick

The Surface Book 2 has powerful specs and the best battery life and most accurate screen of any Windows laptop we tested. It’s reliable enough for most creative tasks, but not quite accurate enough for video color grading and print production.

Buying Options

Also great

The 2018 MacBook Pro has the best display of any laptop we’ve tested, and it’s accurate enough for video color grading and print production. Its keyboard is shallow and its battery life is short, but it’s the most powerful option for those who prefer Apple.

Buying Options

Budget pick

The Dell XPS 15 Touch has fast 4K rendering speeds and decent battery life, and it costs almost $1,000 less than the Microsoft Surface Book 2. Its screen is less accurate, but you can buy a great 4K monitor with the money you save and still have some left over.

Why you should trust us

Wirecutter has been researching and testing laptops since 2013, and our PC team has more than 37 years of collective experience reviewing all kinds of laptops—in addition to the 60 hours we’ve spent researching and testing laptops for video and photo editing work over the past two years.

For this guide, we interviewed 11 creative professionals—three music producers, three product or graphic designers, one 3D modeler, two photographers, a game developer, and a Web developer—to find out what they need in a laptop. Among the experts we spoke to are a composer for Bob’s Burgers, a developer and composer behind the video game Night in the Woods, a senior 3D modeler at Weta Digital, and a graphic designer and illustrator whose work has appeared in The New York Times (parent company of Wirecutter).

Who should get this

A good laptop for photo and video editing should have a high-resolution, high-quality 15-inch screen, but it should also be portable. Photo: Sarah Kobos

If you’re a creative professional looking for a laptop that can perform demanding tasks—including photo editing, video editing, graphic design, drawing, programming and developing, game design, and audio production—on the go, you should get what we call a power notebook.

If you work in print production or color grade video, you should buy a MacBook Pro.

While an ultrabook can perform some of these tasks, a power notebook will let you do more and faster; it will also have a dedicated graphics card, more RAM, often a more powerful processor, and a larger, higher-resolution screen that’s better for doing creative work. A gaming laptop or workstation has the power for these tasks, but a power notebook is more portable, durable, and stylish. (We don’t cover mobile workstations here—most people who need one have very specific needs or will get it through an employer—but if you need a recommendation, Notebookcheck’s top 10 list is a good place to start). Power notebooks are more expensive than most people need though—some cost upwards of $2,500—so it makes sense to spend the money only if you need one for your job.

If you work in print production or color grade video, you should buy a MacBook Pro. Our Windows pick’s display is accurate enough for other video and photo work, though. If you’re in Web development, music production, or game design, and you don’t need production-quality color accuracy, or need it for only part of your workflow, you can buy a less expensive, less color-accurate laptop like our budget pick. For print-quality work, you can even buy our budget pick and pair it with our favorite 4K monitor, which is more accurate than our top pick, for about $400 less.

Apple’s MacBook Pro line has long been the standard-bearer of power notebooks, and most of the creative professionals we interviewed use Macs. But over the past two years, Windows manufacturers have largely caught up with (and in some cases surpassed) MacBooks when it comes to sleek designs, great screens, and powerful hardware—though that doesn't matter if the software you use only works on Macs. We have picks for both Mac and Windows users.

How we picked

The most important features in a power notebook (in rough order of importance) are the processor; memory; storage; dedicated graphics; screen size, resolution, and quality; keyboard and trackpad; weight; ports; and battery life. But not all creative professionals need the same features. The photographers and graphic designers we spoke to emphasized their need for a good screen, for example, while product designers and audio producers prioritized a machine’s available ports.

These are the features that you should look for in a laptop for creative work, but the order will vary based on the work you do:

Memory: We recommend 16 GB as a minimum for smooth performance while multitasking (especially if you’re running RAM-hungry software like Photoshop). A 4K video editor and a 3D modeler who frequently render large scenes told us they want 32 GB of RAM, so we noted laptop models that have the option to upgrade.

Solid-state storage: A solid-state drive (SSD) can read and write data much faster than a traditional hard drive. Having an SSD speeds up any task that requires accessing data, like booting up your laptop, saving and loading files, or rendering video. As for the amount of storage space—the more, the better. A 512 GB SSD is the most cost-effective option for those with large media collections.

Dedicated graphics: A discrete GPU has its own processor and memory (VRAM) that handles graphics processing and allows the laptop’s processor and memory to manage other workloads concurrently. Dedicated graphics are especially important if you work in 4K video editing, 3D rendering, or animation. In 2018, we tested a Windows laptop with Radeon RX Vega M GL graphics against laptops with Nvidia GTX 10-Series graphics, and found that the Vega M GPU was much slower, so we don’t recommend laptops that have it for creative work.1

We tested color accuracy and gamut coverage on five laptops, including the Dell XPS 15 Touch (left) and the Microsoft Surface Book 2 (right). Photo: Sarah Kobos

Display: Apple’s 15-inch MacBook Pro models have a 2880×1800 resolution, which we consider to be the minimum for laptops in this category. But our research and expert interviews showed that many creative professionals prefer the highest resolution possible—in this case, 4K resolution (3840×2160)—for tasks like photo and video editing. For this reason, we prioritized high-quality laptop screens, with accurate colors and wide gamuts out of the box. sRGB color gamut coverage is important because that’s the display mode most people use most of the time. In laptops with an expanded color gamut, like the Dell XPS 15 and the MacBook Pro (2018), we also tested DCI/P3 color gamut coverage, because that’s what you’re paying more for—a wider range of colors. The screen should also be IPS, not TN, because IPS panels provide much better viewing angles and color reproduction.

Keyboard and trackpad: Even if your work setup includes an external keyboard and mouse, your laptop’s keyboard and trackpad should be responsive and comfortable to use for long periods of time when you need them. A poor keyboard and trackpad can ruin an otherwise decent laptop.

Size: Around 80 percent of the creative professionals we interviewed use 15-inch laptops, and we think laptops that weigh around 5 pounds with that size screen provide the best balance of screen real estate and portability. (We didn’t consider mobile workstations because they’re too bulky and heavy to be reasonably portable.)

Ports: Most of the photographers, audio producers, and developers we spoke with require a variety of ports on their laptops. Different ports matter to different users, but a couple of USB 3.0 Type-A ports are universally useful, as is an HDMI port. A Thunderbolt 3 port is handy for future-proofing. (If you buy a laptop with only Thunderbolt 3 ports, check out our guide to the best USB-C adapters, cables, and hubs.) If you’re a photographer, an SD card slot will be important, too.

Battery life: A laptop should have long enough battery life to get you through most of an eight-hour workday, but most creative professionals we spoke to have their laptops plugged in at all times because they work in a fixed location. For this reason, we tested battery life, but it didn’t disqualify any of our contenders.

We eliminated models with dealbreaking flaws mentioned in reviews, like a dull screen or poor build quality, as well as laptops that were unavailable. Then we used what we learned from speaking to 11 creative professionals—three music producers, three product or graphic designers, one 3D modeler, two photographers, a gaming developer, and a Web developer—about their laptop needs, in 2016. Using their expert input, we winnowed our list to five models: the 15-inch Apple MacBook Pro (with Radeon Pro 560X graphics), Asus ZenBook Pro 15, Dell XPS 15 Touch, HP Spectre x360, and Microsoft Surface Book 2. We tested the 15-inch Apple MacBook Pro with Radeon Pro Vega 20 graphics in May 2019. We’re interested in testing the Razer Blade 15 4K Touch and the Lenovo ThinkPad P1 in the future, and we will update this guide when we do.

How we tested

We worked with Chris Heinonen, senior AV staff writer for Wirecutter, to test the contrast ratio, color accuracy, and gamut of each laptop’s display using customized tests in the CalMAN 2016 software-calibration suite.

For contrast ratio, we expect a result of at least 1,000:1, and all of the laptops we tested for this guide passed that threshold. It wasn’t a differentiating factor for our picks. The CalMAN tests also produce DeltaE 2000 numbers for each screen, which show us how close the displayed color is to what it’s supposed to be; the lower the number, the better. A value of under 1.0 is nearly perfect, and under 2.0 is sufficient for print production work. At around 3.0, you begin to see a difference between the screen and its reference.

Color gamut, or the range of colors that can be accurately represented on a device, is also important, so we used our CalMAN tests to determine how much of the sRGB color gamut (and, when applicable, the DCI/P3 color gamut) each laptop screen could reproduce. The ideal score is 100 percent; our numbers will not go past that, because reporting numbers larger than 100 percent can give the impression of full gamut coverage even in cases where that isn’t true.

To test each laptop’s rendering speed, we worked with our photography team to export 4K video footage using a compression preset in Adobe Premiere Pro.2 We tested each laptop’s real-world battery life by setting each laptop’s screen backlight to 150 nits (candelas per square meter; cd/m²) and ran a Web-browsing battery test that cycles through Web pages, email, Google docs, and video. Because we set each laptop to the same brightness, the results were directly comparable. Finally, we used each laptop for at least one workday to get a feel for its keyboard, trackpad, screen, and speakers, and we traveled with them to and from a coffee shop to get a feel for portability.

Our pick: Microsoft Surface Book 2

Photo: Sarah Kobos

Our pick

The Surface Book 2 has powerful specs and the best battery life and most accurate screen of any Windows laptop we tested. It’s reliable enough for most creative tasks, but not quite accurate enough for video color grading and print production.

Buying Options

The Microsoft Surface Book 2 is the best Windows laptop for creative professionals because it has the best combination of performance, screen quality, and portability. In tests, the Microsoft Surface Book 2 showed that it’s powerful enough to handle demanding workloads, and it renders 4K video very fast—faster than most of the competition. It has the most color-accurate screen of any Windows laptop we tested—though not as accurate as the MacBook Pro, the only laptop we recommend for video color grading and print production work—and it covers 95 percent of the sRGB color gamut. Plus, the Surface Book 2 has a great keyboard and trackpad, it has a variety of ports, and it’s light enough to carry around for work. It has the longest battery life of all the laptops we tested, too, at 7 hours, 20 minutes. You can even detach its screen and use it as a tablet if you want. But its screen isn’t quite accurate enough for print production work, it’s much thicker than the competition, and when closed it has a wide gap near its hinge thanks to that detachable screen.

The Microsoft Surface Book 2 and the Dell XPS 15 Touch were, by far, the fastest at exporting 4K footage in Adobe Premiere Pro; shorter bars indicate better performance. We tested the 15-inch MacBook Pro (2018) with an Intel Core i9 processor; the i7 processor we recommend will be slower.

The Microsoft Surface Book 2 had a 2.6 score in grayscale testing, which is good; it means that images on the screen are accurate and mostly free of color tint. The Microsoft Surface Book 2 measured a solid 2.9 in CalMAN's ColorChecker test, but the big spikes within the pinks and yellows make it a bad choice for color grading and print production work. The Microsoft Surface Book 2 had a 3.0 mark in Saturation Sweep, which is good overall. But the spikes in greens and yellows mean it’s not the best option for very color-sensitive work, like video color grading, for example. The Microsoft Surface Book 2 scored a 2.8 in color points testing. The blues and purples drifted most from their targets, while the others—reds, especially—remained accurate.

The Microsoft Surface Book 2 had the most color-accurate display of the Windows laptops we tested, although none of the Windows laptops we tested were as accurate as the Apple MacBook Pro, and we don’t recommend them for video color grading or print production work. In our CalMAN test, the Surface Book 2 had an average grayscale dE2000 of 2.6, which means that images are mostly free of color tint, aren’t washed out, and details are visible in dark shadows, so the images on your screen will look like the creator intended. (Lower is better: A score below 1.0 means the difference between the displayed color and a reference is invisible to the eye when side by side; a score under 2.0 is sufficient for print-production work; and a score below 3.0 means the differences between the display and a reference are considered indiscernible when in motion.) The Microsoft Surface Book 2 measured a 2.9 score in ColorChecker, 3.0 in Saturation Sweep, and a 2.8 in color points; all of which test the display’s ability to accurately show a variety of colors’ hues and saturations.

A wide color gamut is important for tasks like photo editing because if you can’t see the full gamut, some of the colors you’re seeing are inaccurate. We found that the Microsoft Surface Book 2’s screen covers nearly all (95 percent) of the sRGB color gamut; which most people interested in serious video- and photo-editing will be using. It lacks support for the DCI/P3 color gamut, but the creative professionals we spoke to weren’t as concerned with DCI/P3 as they were with sRGB. The MacBook Pro (2018) covers more of the sRGB color gamut (99.8 percent), and a lot of the DCI/P3 color gamut (75.9 percent).

The Microsoft Surface Book 2 had a comfortable keyboard and an accurate trackpad—some of the best we tested this year. Photo: Sarah Kobos

The Surface Book 2 had one of the best keyboards we tested this year. (Laptop Mag measured 1.2 millimeter of key travel. The Dell XPS 15 and Apple MacBook Pro both feel shallower, with 0.8 millimeter and 0.7 millimeter of key travel, respectively.) Its keys bounced back when we used them, and they offered an easy and enjoyable typing experience. The Surface Book 2’s trackpad has a crisp physical click when pressed, and we never experienced any issues with palm rejection or gestures, like using two fingers to right-click, scroll, and zoom. The medium-size touchpad fit the size of our hands better, which felt less awkward to use than the MacBook Pro’s huge one, but your mileage may vary.

The Surface Book 2 has the smallest width of any laptop we tested at 13.5 inches, though its 9.9 inches in length made it longer than all of the other laptops we brought in; but the size differences from model to model weren’t so major that they were noticeable in our testing. The biggest difference between the Surface Book 2 and the competition is its thickness: In part because of its detachable screen and odd hinge, it's 0.88 inch thick, with a large gap between the screen and keyboard at the hinge, while the Apple MacBook Pro is just 0.38 inch, and the Dell XPS 15 Touch is 0.63 inch thick. The Surface Book 2 is on the lighter side of the laptops we tested, though, at 4.2 pounds; all of the power notebooks we tested were between 4 pounds and 4.6 pounds.

The Surface Book 2 has all the necessary ports: two USB 3.0 ports, a USB-C port (though not Thunderbolt 3), as well as a full-size SD card reader and a proprietary Surface Connect port. We’d like to see Microsoft incorporate a Thunderbolt 3 port into its line of Surface Books in the future, since it’s the fastest, most versatile port—it can transfer data at speeds up to 40 Gbps, and carry power and display data over a single cable—and many other companies have now incorporated Thunderbolt 3 into their laptops.

The Microsoft Surface Book 2 had the longest battery life of any laptop we tested, at 7 hours, 20 minutes; longer bars indicate better performance.

The Surface Book 2 had the longest battery life of any laptop we tested, at 7 hours, 20 minutes in our Web-browsing test. This means that it should last a full day of work, although those with heavier workloads should expect shorter battery life. While the Surface Book 2 had the longest battery life, the Apple MacBook Pro had one of the shorter battery lives we tested, at 5 hours, 29 minutes. Our budget pick had 6 hours, 53 minutes of battery life, too.

The Surface Book 2’s screen is detachable—you can remove its top half from the keyboard by pressing a dedicated key to unlock the hinge. Then you can use the Surface Book as a 1.8-pound tablet with integrated graphics to draw, take notes, watch videos, or browse the Web. It’s compatible with the $100 Surface Pen stylus, but we weren’t able to test it. The Surface Book 2 has its own Surface Connect port, so it can be charged separate from the keyboard. This detachable screen is a neat addition, especially for illustrators and artists, though it’s not a requirement for laptops in this category.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The Surface Book 2 is much thicker than its competition, at 0.88 inch, with a sizeable gap between the two halves. The Apple MacBook Pro (top), by comparison, is extremely thin, at 0.38 inch. Photo: Sarah Kobos

The Surface Book 2 is much thicker than the competition when it’s closed, and it has a wide gap near its hinge because of its detachable screen. With its lid shut, the laptop measures 0.88 inch thick near the hinge and 0.59 inch at its thinnest point; comparatively, the MacBook Pro is just 0.38 inch thick, and the XPS 15 Touch is 0.63 inch thick. The Surface Book 2’s thickness is caused in part by the hinge we mentioned, and in part because the Surface Book 2’s screen half contains components that allow it to be detached for use as a tablet. Dirt or dust can fall into this opening and gunk up your screen and keyboard. We haven’t experienced or read reports of any damage to the screen or keyboard, but this is a poor design decision nonetheless.

If you want a Mac: MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2018)

Photo: Sarah Kobos

Also great

The 2018 MacBook Pro has the best display of any laptop we’ve tested, and it’s accurate enough for video color grading and print production. Its keyboard is shallow and its battery life is short, but it’s the most powerful option for those who prefer Apple.

Buying Options

If your workflow requires macOS, Apple’s 15-inch MacBook Pro (2018) is the best option. The newest MacBook offers solid performance and the best screen and trackpad of any laptop we’ve tested, and it’s the only one of our picks that’s technically accurate enough for video color grading and print production work out of the box. The MacBook Pro has a shallow keyboard, its battery lasted only 5 hours, 29 minutes, and it lacks legacy ports—which nearly half of the creative professionals we interviewed said was a disqualifying inconvenience. But even so, the 15-inch model is the only MacBook powerful enough for creative professionals.

We recommend the 2018 15-inch model with a 2.6 GHz six-core eighth-generation Intel Core i7 processor, 16 GB of RAM, 512 GB of solid-state storage, and a Radeon Pro Vega 20 dedicated graphics card with 4 GB of memory—a configuration that costs about $3,150 at the time of publication. It also has a 15.4-inch, 2880×1800 Retina display. (You can customize your MacBook Pro with 32 GB of RAM instead, if you know you need the extra memory.)

The configuration we recommend offers performance generally equivalent to that of the Microsoft Surface Book 2, except in Adobe Premiere and battery testing. The 2018 MacBook Pro we tested took an average of 3 minutes to export 4K video footage with Adobe Premiere Pro 12.1, about a minute longer than the Surface Book 2 took.3 When we retested the MacBook Pro with the latest version (13.1.2) of Adobe Premiere Pro, though, it took just 1 minute, 33 seconds to export. We suspect Adobe further optimized hardware encoding on macOS between these two versions of Premiere. (We’ll be testing new Windows models for comparison in the coming months.)

The MacBook Pro measured a 1.8 in CalMAN's grayscale test, which was better than any other laptop we tested. The MacBook Pro measured a low 1.4 CalMAN score in the ColorChecker test, which means the laptop can show a variety of colors’ hues and saturations accurately. This makes it the only laptop display we tested that’s accurate enough for video color grading and print production work. The MacBook Pro measured an impressive 1.1 in the CalMAN Saturation Sweep test. The MacBook Pro’s color bars barely stretch past the green line (marking a score of 1.0) in this test, which means you won’t be able to tell between the colors on a MacBook Pro’s screen and a reference. The MacBook Pro scored 1.1 in color points testing, which is essentially perfect. The MacBook Pro’s colors all remained within their targets, a feat that none of the other laptops we tested were able to accomplish.

The 2018 15-inch MacBook Pro had the most color-accurate display out of the box and a wide color gamut, making it the only one of our picks that’s technically accurate enough for print production work. In our CalMAN test, the MacBook Pro scored an average grayscale dE2000 of 1.8, much better than the Microsoft Surface Book 2’s score of 2.6. (The closer to zero, the better.) It had an impressive score of 1.4 in the ColorChecker test; its Saturations and color points scores both landed at extremely accurate 1.1 point. We found that the MacBook Pro covered 99.83 percent of the sRGB color gamut and 75.86 percent of the DCI/P3 color gamut; the Dell XPS 15 Touch was the only laptop that covered more of both gamuts than the MacBook did, although its colors weren’t nearly as accurate.

The 2018 MacBook Pro has a shallow keyboard that takes some getting used to, even though it’s an improvement over previous versions, but it has the best trackpad we’ve used on a laptop. Photo: Sarah Kobos

The 2018 MacBook Pro has a shallow keyboard, with keys that offer only 0.8 mm of travel according to Laptop Mag, though it does have an updated keyboard designed to prevent dust from entering the undersides of its keys. It appears to be more durable than previous models as well; iFixit found that there is a silicone cover underneath every key to prevent dust and dirt from getting below the keys. After a while, you may become accustomed to the less-clicky, short-travel keys of the MacBook Pro, but even with the keyboard’s improvements, it still isn’t as enjoyable to use as the keys on the mid-2015 MacBook Pro. The 2018 MacBook Pro’s trackpad is the most accurate we’ve used on a laptop; you can click anywhere on the touchpad and receive the same response because it has no hinge, and its haptic feedback is gratifying. Its width can occasionally be annoying, though.

Despite seeming like a nifty feature, the MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar, which replaces the traditional row of physical function keys (including the Escape key!) with a touch-sensitive strip of virtual buttons, was occasionally a nuisance, disrupting our workflow. And although you can use its Touch Bar for quick and easy timeline scrubbing, its lack of physical keys will be a particular hassle for developers, graphic designers, and other creative professionals, who rely heavily on keyboard shortcuts and muscle memory to do their work. The addition of Touch ID is really convenient for unlocking the laptop and making purchases, though.

The 2018 MacBook Pro is a smidge bigger than the Microsoft Surface Book 2, at 13.8 inches by 9.5 inches, but it weighs about 0.2 pound less, at 4.02 pounds—and it’s much thinner with its lid closed, at 0.38 inch, versus the Surface Book 2’s 0.88 inch. It has four Thunderbolt 3 ports, which allow the laptop to charge, transfer data, and connect to displays from any of its ports. But it has no legacy ports, something that nearly half of the creative professionals we interviewed in 2016 said is a dealbreaker. This lack of traditional ports requires creative professionals to change their workflows—which likely includes lots of peripherals—to include multiple adapters, cables, and hubs for connecting crucial accessories, and that costs money, time, and convenience. But the 2018 MacBook Pro is the only MacBook with a discrete graphics card, so creative Mac professionals will have to stock up on dongles and deal.

The 2018 MacBook Pro didn’t perform well in our battery life test, running for 5 hours, 29 minutes; this result is low compared with what we saw from our other picks, and it means that the MacBook Pro won’t last a full workday without being charged. The Microsoft Surface Book 2 lasted for 7 hours, 20 minutes, nearly 2 hours longer, and our budget pick, the Dell XPS 15 Touch, lasted for 6 hours, 53 minutes, nearly 1.5 hours longer.

Budget pick: Dell XPS 15 Touch

Photo: Sarah Kobos

Budget pick

The Dell XPS 15 Touch has fast 4K rendering speeds and decent battery life, and it costs almost $1,000 less than the Microsoft Surface Book 2. Its screen is less accurate, but you can buy a great 4K monitor with the money you save and still have some left over.

Buying Options

If you want a cheaper option, or if you need a laptop for music producing, game design, or Web developing, we recommend the Dell XPS 15 Touch. Although its screen is much better at displaying accurate color than your average laptop’s screen, it isn’t as color accurate as the Apple MacBook Pro or the Microsoft Surface Book 2, and its reds in particular were so oversaturated that you can’t rely on it for color grading video or still images unless you pair it with an accurate external monitor. It quickly exported 4K video in Adobe Premiere Pro, though, and its battery life is nearly as long as our best contenders. But its webcam is located in an inconvenient place below its screen.

For around $2,100—almost $1,000 less than our top pick—the XPS 15 Touch has a 15.6-inch 3840×2160 IPS touchscreen, an Intel Core i7-8750H processor, upgradable 16 GB of RAM, a 512 GB solid-state drive, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050Ti graphics card with 4 GB of VRAM. In real-world performance testing, the Dell XPS 15 Touch exported 4K footage with Adobe Premiere Pro five seconds faster than the Microsoft Surface Book 2 (within the margin of error), at 2 minutes flat.

The Dell XPS 15 Touch had a good score of 2.0 in grayscale CalMAN testing. The Dell XPS 15 Touch scored a 3.0 in our ColorChecker CalMAN test, and its reds in particular were too oversaturated for video editing or photo editing. The Dell XPS 15 Touch scored a 2.6 in the CalMAN Saturation Sweep test, which is good overall, although that spike in the last row of colors means that they are noticeably oversaturated. The Dell XPS 15 Touch's color-points score of 5.0 is flat-out bad. Most of the color points are way outside their targets—the reds and blues are oversaturated, and purples and greens have hue errors.

Its screen is much better than the HP Spectre x360’s and the Asus ZenBook Pro 15’s, but it isn’t as color accurate as the Microsoft Surface Book 2’s, and it wasn’t reliable enough for accurate video and photo editing. In our CalMAN test, the Dell XPS 15 Touch scored an average grayscale dE2000 of 2.0, which is very good, better than the Microsoft Surface Book 2’s 2.6; it means that grays will be mostly free of color tint, so images will look as the creator intended. We found the reds were oversaturated in our ColorChecker test, where it scored a 3.0, and all of the colors in the Saturation Sweep were too saturated; it scored an average dE2000 of 2.6. It also had a bad score of 5.0 in color-points testing; its reds and blues were very oversaturated, and its greens and purples may have hue errors, which means that you shouldn’t rely on this screen for accurate video- and photo-editing work. It’s a good budget option if you don’t need accuracy above all else, or if you can pair it with a color-accurate monitor.

If you plan on using your XPS 15 Touch somewhere with enough room to house an external monitor, we recommend pairing it with our favorite 4K monitor, the HP Z27. The Z27 monitor has great, even CalMAN scores across the board, which we noted while we evaluated 4K monitors. In our ColorChecker test it scored at 2.68 points, and its Saturation Sweep came in at 2.42 points. It easily beat the Microsoft Surface Book 2, which scored 2.9 points in the ColorChecker test and 3.0 points in the Saturation Sweep, and much less variability in accuracy between colors. Buying the XPS 15 Touch and the monitor will cost less than one Surface Book 2, too. But we only recommend buying the XPS 15 Touch for photo editing if you're able to use an external monitor 100 percent of the time that you’re doing editing work.

The Dell XPS 15 Touch was able to display 100 percent of the sRGB color gamut, even more than the Microsoft Surface Book 2’s 95.2 percent. But gamut doesn’t matter as much as color accuracy when you’re working in video and photo editing.

The Dell XPS 15 Touch’s keyboard is shallower than we’d like; Laptop Mag measured 0.7 mm of travel. Although key travel is on the shallower end of the spectrum, and its keys aren’t as punchy as those on the Windows Surface Book 2, it’s still bouncier and more responsive than what we experienced with the MacBook Pro or the Asus ZenBook Pro 15 we tested. Its trackpad was the perfect size for us in testing; it was easy to navigate Web pages and click where we meant to. Gestures worked well, and zooming in felt easy and natural.

We only recommend buying the XPS 15 Touch for photo editing if you're able to use an external monitor 100 percent of the time.

The XPS 15 is a little bigger than the Surface Book 2 at 14 inches by 9.3 inches, and it weighs a little more, at 4.5 pounds. The size and weight difference weren’t noticeable in everyday use, though. It’s thinner than the Surface Book 2 when its shut; we measured 0.63 inch, thinner than the Surface Book 2 by a little more than 0.2 inch. The XPS 15 Touch has a useful mix of old and new ports: one Thunderbolt 3 port—which our top pick lacks—one USB 3.0 port, an HDMI slot, an SD card reader, and a Noble lock slot. It also has a useful battery status indicator.

The Dell XPS 15 Touch lasted 6 hours, 53 minutes during our battery life test, about 30 minutes less than the Microsoft Surface Book 2, but long enough for a day spent recording and producing music, or completing a Web design project.

The Dell XPS 15 Touch’s webcam is inconveniently placed below its screen. If you frequently make video calls and you’re concerned about meeting participants seeing up your nose, you may want to consider our other picks.

What to look forward to

HP announced the Spectre x360 15 at the CES 2019 trade show. It’s the first HP laptop to feature an OLED display, plus an eighth-gen Intel Core i7 processor, 16 GB of RAM, and 512 GB of SSD storage.

The new Razer Blade offers a 15.6-inch 4K touchscreen display and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card for $2,900. We plan on testing it soon, and we will update this guide with our thoughts.

The new Lenovo ThinkPad P1 has a 15.6-inch 4K touchscreen display and an Nvidia Quadro P2000 graphics card for $2,300. It could be a good budget contender. We’re hoping to test it over the next few months.

The competition

The HP Spectre x360 had terrible CalMAN marks in our testing—all around the 4.0 mark and well beyond (ideally, we look for results below 3.0)—and it was the slowest laptop we tested when exporting 4K video. We enjoyed using its keyboard and trackpad for work, it had the second-longest battery life of the laptops we tested, and it’s a few hundred dollars less expensive than our budget pick for the same specs, but we can’t recommend it because of the test results we mentioned above.

The Asus ZenBook Pro 15 gave us good CalMAN results, but it displays only in Adobe RGB, which doesn’t help those who will use the sRGB color spectrum (most video and photo editors). It took about 30 seconds longer than both the Microsoft Surface Book 2 and Dell XPS 15 Touch to export 4K video, and its keyboard and trackpad felt less natural to use than the other contenders we tested. It also had shockingly poor battery life—3 hours, 44 minutes in our test—so we don’t think the ZenBook Pro 15 is the right choice for video and photo editing.

Although it has a new, eighth-generation processor and powerful GPU, the HP Omen Laptop 15t is thicker, wider, and deeper than all the laptops we tested, at 14.2 inches by 10.4 inches by 1 inch. It also weighs nearly 6 pounds; the laptops we brought in for testing were all 4.5 pounds or less.

Footnotes

We tested the HP Spectre x360 with Radeon RX Vega M GL graphics with 4 GB HMB2 VRAM and an eighth-generation i7-8705G processor. In our Adobe Premiere Pro tests, the HP took more than twice as long to export 4K video as the other laptops we tested with Nvidia graphics; it took 4 minutes, 42 seconds, while the Microsoft Surface Book 2 with Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 graphics exported 4K video in 2 minutes, 5 seconds.

In our 2018 tests we exported 4K video in Adobe Premiere Pro version 12.1. In our 2019 update, we tested Apple’s 15-inch MacBook Pro with Vega 20 Graphics with both the 12.1 version and the 12.1.2 version of Premiere Pro.

The 15-inch MacBook Pro we tested has an Intel Core i9 processor with 32 GB of RAM, but we recommend purchasing the i7 processor with 16 GB of RAM. You’ll see slower speeds than we found here, but the upgrade isn’t worth the extra $300 for the processor, or $400 for more RAM for most video- and photo-editing tasks.